Most digital hybrid documents have been produced either on a full color device, with the attendant cost of printing the monochrome portions at color rates, or they have been printed on separate color and monochrome devices and then manually collated into a complete document. Both methods are relatively costly and inefficient, making them appropriate only for short or infrequent hybrid jobs. In the first case, printing black and white pages on a color printer guarantees set and job integrity of the output. This is especially important with variable information (VI) documents such as 401(k) statements that usually differ in number of pages per set and necessarily vary in content. The downside of printing all pages on a color unit is that the black and white pages cost far more than on a monochrome printer.
In the second case, mere “job splitting” into color pages and monochrome pages is not a productive alternative for long or complex jobs. When the pages are manually merged after printing, there is significant risk of collation errors. If merging is accomplished on an offline high-speed collator, every jam results in a spoiled document and necessitates reprinting the set later. Feeding problems and page out-of-sequence conditions may cause intermixing of pages from different documents in the same set. Even if defective sets are caught, “splitting” provides no information for reprinting spoiled sets and sets with integrity errors.
What is needed is a printing system that enables users to split a print job between more cost effective color printers and monochrome printers without the above mentioned problems.